


Fragments

by aisle_one



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Anal Sex, Child Neglect, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:40:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1721852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aisle_one/pseuds/aisle_one
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short (and possibly longer) bits inspired by X-Men DOFP.</p><p>1) Making Amends<br/>2) Conversations - The first time Charles tells anyone, he chooses to tell Erik.<br/>3) Interlude</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Making Amends

So much of him is different. So much is the same. The sharp burst of laughter, absent the bitter edge. The sigh, though restrained, puttering past his thinned lips like exhaust polluting the air. The wet gasp that follows when Erik’s spit-slick finger enters him. 

The rattle in his breath - so much the same. Erik collapses against Charles’s back and buries his face in Charles’s hair. So much is different.

He is softer, but spare. There are visible gaps between his ribs. The sleek line of his clavicle more prominent. Erik forces Charles to look, to see - _there, that’s you_ \- blurred and unfocused in the foggy mirror. _And me._ Erik widens his stance, braces his feet, drags Charles off his as he pushes up and forward, and in, in in in.

Charles stops him with a hand. Blunt grip on Erik’s thigh. His face is pressed to the glass, his waist pinched over the sink. They’ve never done this before, like this. Standing up.

 _Too much?_ Erik forgets to say it aloud. Old habits, etc. But Charles shakes his head as if he had heard. His palm slides sweaty and familiar down Erik’s thigh. A flash of memory. Another night, a humid summer. On a cot, in a military compound, forsaking the concrete floor where their first time might have been. _Slow_ \- and Erik answers in Charles’s language, linking their fingers. With his other hand, he sweeps his knuckles down Charles’s face, over his forehead, brushes a thumb between his furrowed brows, and Charles relaxes, if only in the slightest. If it only it were so easy. Touch and heal and harmonize.

“Darling,” Charles whispers in Erik’s ear, hovering so close to his mouth. So much the same.

“Charles,” Erik grunts. He catches Charles’s eyes in the mirror. A flicker of sorrow in blue muddled by desire. Erik’s chest tightens and he squeezes Charles to him, pounds away in fury, a conflicted mess of accusation and apology pent up for over a decade, with ruthless precision. Charles bows under him, spine taut though curved delicately, resistance in his fists even as he hisses encouragement. Do it, do it, do it.

Someone bangs on the sink.

Another growls - “Quiet!”

The other startles with a laugh. Sweet and tinkling and melodic.

“You first,” Charles says suddenly, with a rude and naughty smirk, and twists his hips, and as if on cue Erik comes. So much the same. Except - 

Erik wakes before the dream resolves, blinking at his empty hands, bereft of Charles, his supple flesh, his hips in mid-stutter, left wanting.

Charles is still awake, determinedly staring out the window, eyes adamantly averted away from Erik.

 _You did this_ \- an echo from the past.

He spies the chess set, feels the hum of the metallic pieces calling to him as fiercely as Charles’s disapproval. His _hurt_. He hasn’t played in a long while. He casts another glance at Charles. Perhaps -


	2. Conversations

The things Logan knows - it’s true. Charles doesn’t tell anyone for years. His unraveling mind, at nine years old, the hammering voices, inane, accusing, hostile, weepy. Pleading, yelling. Plodding a day’s worth of mundane tasks - _should get up. Make some coffee. Where did I put that …_ Sharper: _Shut up. Shut up! Shut up!_ Directed at a newborn in a crying fit, the mother in a helpless rage. _He can’t. Would he? Not after the other night. He loves me. I know he does._ Another mother. Charles’s. Tormented by insecurity, needy for acceptance. Kurt’s withholding made an addict out of her. 

At twelve years old, realization clarified his circumstance. It was effortless, occurring on an afternoon when he was bedridden yet again, forced to immobility by the thundering storm in his head. Hooves beating at his skull was the explanation he had resorted to. A crippling migraine, not insanity, not schizophrenia, as it might have been diagnosed had he confided the truth, for though Charles was young, the voices aged him and he understood the likely consequence of confessing his secret. He hid, as a matter of necessity. As a matter of preserving the little afforded to him in the scraps of affection that his mother doled out when she was high on an incident of Kurt’s spoiling. Rarely did Kurt indulge her, though when he did, it was extravagant, excessive, and it spilled in stray touches to Charles’s cheek. His mother’s delicate, ornamented fingers caressing his face. A kiss to his temple. A soothing rub over his back - there, there.

But as he lay in bed, following a spree, after Kurt’s spoiling went stale as it inevitably did, devolving to a wall of silence that went for days, weeks, despite the racket, the maelstrom of _whore wicked woman smell of her disgusting pig stupid child useless the lot of them if it wasn’t for the money must be a way out of this_ \- though in Kurt’s voice, Charles convinced himself it was his imagination. No stretch from the truth as he had caught Kurt spewing this vile to someone on the telephone, in a strained whisper so brittle it threatened to snap. Charles withered like a dry leaf behind the curtain where he stood. He nearly passed out. The voices had gone volcanic, erupting in a rush. How he managed to squeeze himself to almost invisibility, inching as far into a corner as it would fit him, careful, careful not to give himself away through the rustling of cloth. The window had been open. It could pretend a breeze. He trembled. The fear of discovery gripped him.

Not long after that Charles sought the solace of his bedroom. In bed, too, he had trembled. Under the sheets, curled up like a pillbug. Left there perhaps he would fossilize to an expired date, crusty and forgotten. His mother willed it. With every fiber of her being, sick to nearly vomiting with want, lacing Charles’s own stomach with her revulsion and nausea, reasoning if not for him - that was when Charles realized it. Truth sucked him down, down to a horrific hell beyond the voices, to a roiling pit, a sea of wordless emotions, of pure id and animalistic desire and rage, a universe of undistilled hatred. It claimed him. Before he could think to resist, to slow the descent, to scramble for something, anything, to stop the avalanche, his tumbling down to the unrepentant, undiluted state of wishful thinking, if it could be bared to the world without judgment -

There and then, Charles learned. He was not insane. It was more simple than that. He was not wanted.

 

_

 

Had choice been an option, Charles might have chosen insanity. Might have? He barks out a laugh. The suddenness of it startles Erik. He certainly would have chosen it.

Erik is scrutinizing him. Charles turns away, wishing fervently for a solid barrier between them. He stares out of the window, registers the blue in the skies, the puffs of white material only to the eyes, sees the past in a rosy hue, staged like a 50s family sitcom. What had he hoped to accomplish by telling Erik? Logan was not the first to know, merely a messenger delivering a fact. Charles had confessed it eventually. To whom? What did it matter. The future was Charles’s to mold and the unburdening had been instinctive, a pawn exchanged for Erik’s, an attempt at equanimity. Erik had easily surrendered the fact of his martyrdom, after all, why not this? 

“My friend - ” Erik’s voice breaks. From the corner of Charles’s eyes, he spies Erik’s hand hovering over his, paused, uncertain. 

Charles had learned to swim above the fray of voices, to resist the swirling tide and pull from the black pit of despair nurtured within every living, breathing human organism craving to be substantial. Haunted and yearning, seeking some sort of redemption. It was too much. The pain had become intolerable. Loss weakened him, shattering the mechanisms by which he had learned to survive. Even the singular weight of his grief seemed too much to bear. Distraught, wallowing in regret, he ached for Erik, for the place reserved only for Charles where understanding and welcome thrived in the pit, a lamp lit for Charles to find his own way. 

Did Erik - 

The question suspends itself. Alone, ego grievously injured. Pitiful. A little shit, as Logan had succinctly concluded. He can hardly dare it. To think. To hope. To believe … was he? Still. Did Erik still want him?

And he nearly squashes it. That reckless, childish voice, that petulant thing that had grown so cocksure of itself after a little hand-waving, the magician’s trick, distract and deflect. And he had nearly believed in it. Pygmalion’s creature. The caricature of Charles - _Professor Xavier_. He nearly laughs again. Oh, the absurdity. He could compel adoration. Worship. Snap-snap of his fingers. And had the need to _belong_ been steeped in a more selfish desire for satiety, he might have gone that route. Flipped a switch and been done with it. Instead, he tried. He tried and tried, birthing a grander cause for his detested mutation. Affixing a pleasant demeanor. Palatable for the masses. For Raven. For Angel and Sean and Alex. For Erik - except.

Except on a cot, in a military compound, on a humid summer night, legs twined, his sweaty back plastered to Erik’s chest, his fingers to Charles’s temple, Erik said, “I’m not fooled.” But he would stay. Plant a kiss on Charles’s cheek. And whisper: “I don’t have to be.”

And, finally, Erik clasps his hand, threads his fingers through Charles’s. “Tell me,” he says - of the months, the years, the gaps in their history, let the yarn of storytelling unspool and hold back nothing - “tell me everything.”


	3. Interlude

It is easy to fall into routine. The bickering: Erik adamant on annihilation; Charles pleading for compromise. But it isn’t, Charles protests, though Erik insists it is. _Understanding_ , and Charles adjusts his tone as if righting an awry frame hung on the wall. Erik snorts. The argument is a decade and a half old, ripe in its teens, bristling with characteristic contempt and rebellion. It is not cast aside, but ignored, for the moment.

It is easy to fall into their niche. The valley, where their fingers twine and lock, and unify.

He _is_ kind. His darling Erik, as Charles has taken to thinking of him, to murmuring in the quiet, in the solitude of night when melancholy, nostalgia, or simple longing pulls an ache rooted, it seems, from time without beginning, eternity in a spiraling loop, for as long as it feels he has known this man, and loved him. A phantom pain, not unlike the loss of feeling in his legs. At times, he misses Erik terribly.

But, now, they kiss. They are _somewhere_. Erik refused to say and Charles obliged the journey with his eyes firmly shut. So little surprises him, why not indulge? Eyes closed, mind wrestled to an admiring restraint, even as Erik is sans helmet - a reforming habit.

The wind nips his cheeks and sweeps the hair from Erik’s face. The tip of his nose is pink. Charles laughs, unguarded as a schoolboy, weightless from the temporary absence of worry, tickled at the sight. Erik pretends to wrestle him to the ground, onto the picnic blanket gone wrinkled from use. 

“Wait, wait,” Charles gasps, as Erik snakes a hand under his shirt. Inches above Charles’s head, the thermos of tea tips threateningly. With a single snap of Erik’s fingers, the thing uprights itself, performs a little tap routine - _bows_ \- and launches into the basket, rattling a tinkling melody against a metal jar of jam before it goes still. “Lovely,” Charles says, amused and ever devoted. It might be child’s play, certainly not as impressive as Erik’s grander gestures. Then again, Charles was accustomed to grand displays. To show-stopping numbers. And, yet, a thermos of tea, steeped to Charles’s preference, _vibrating_ \- and it would be somewhat of a joke later when the tea was replaced with whiskey and the thermos put to other uses - Charles’s favorite Beatles song: well. _Charmed._ Yes, the thermos and Charles, were equally charmed by Erik’s talents.

Erik still pauses when he comes to Charles’s belt, or the button that fastens his trousers shut. His frantic hands become reverent, careful and sweet, and gentle as the kiss that Erik unfailingly places on Charles’s stomach, below his bellybutton where Charles can still feel it, and _how_ it makes him tremble.

_My darling_ , Charles thinks.

_Say it._

Oh.

His shut eyes open to find Erik staring down at him. “Hi,” he says, thumbing Charles’s cheeks.

“Hello,” Charles answers. Old friend. “My darling, Erik.”


End file.
